A Rope of Thorns

by Gemma Files

  And yet, for all that—for all that, Morrow found he still trusted Chess more than he’d ever trusted the Rev, even at his most charming or soft-spoken. Their dalliance continued, even now; Chess wasn’t one to deprive himself of pleasures, and if it was a choice between fucking or fighting, considering the power disparity involved, Morrow knew which one he’d keep on choosing.

  One way or the other, Chess and Morrow had drifted with odd swiftness into what Morrow could only deem some variety of demented battlefield camaraderie—a bond only accentuated by Chess’s damnable facility in applying himself to a man’s tenderest places: shameless, inventive, with Spartan revelry his favourite type of relief from the barest moment’s boredom. And though it was never a taste he’d looked to acquire, the truth was, Morrow could no longer (in good conscience) deny how he very definitely had acquired it—as regards to Chess, at any rate, if nobody else.

  Would it stick, though? Morrow wondered. Wondered if Chess—opaque as ever—wondered, too. From mere observation, Morrow already knew how he could be a jealous little sumbitch, if and when things got a bit deeper than a passing Hey you, c’mere, I got somethin’ for ya—now you gimme somethin’ too, you big bastard.

  Even with all they’d done together, however, Morrow didn’t exactly know if they’d reached that stage, as yet. Or if he even wanted them to.

  “Am I queer now?” he hadn’t been able to stop himself from asking Chess, just the night before.

  To which Chess had shrugged, and replied, “Halfways, at best. Why? Worried you’ll be doggin’ after every other man you come ’cross?”

  “’Course not.”

  “Exactly.” Chess turned over, stretching, and fit his head to the sweat-slick hollow of Morrow’s chest with creepish casualness, for all the world like it’d been made to act his pillow. “Then again, I am a special case, by anybody’s reckoning. Most men ain’t been to Hell and back, queer or not; most ain’t had their hearts cut out and ate by a damn god, and lived to tell the tale. So I figure you’re safe enough, regarding frolics with anybody else . . . ’less you don’t want to be.”

  Morrow snorted. “No fear,” he said.

  “Still,” Chess had blithely continued when they were up and dressed the next morning, just as though they hadn’t paused to sleep—and screw some more—in the interim, “it’s probably best we keep things light, anyhow. ’Cause much as I hate to admit so, seems my Ma was right, all along: love really is a damn disease.”

  “Going by the Rev, you mean? But what makes you think she even knew what she was on about? And ’sides that, what makes you think—”

  Chess shot him a shrewd look. “Think what?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “That Rook’s the only one I’ll ever love—was that it? Why ex-Agent Morrow, you sad sentimental. Or was that your clumsy idea of offerin’ an alternative?”

  Morrow didn’t bother to answer, blushing to his hat-hid ears. And Chess laughed, off and on, throughout the rest of the day—almost from the time they mounted up right to the time they made camp once more.

  All of which maybe proved Morrow either far too lust-struck to think straight, too punch-drunk on hexation-overspill to be reliable, simply plain stark crazy, or all three at once. But it had to count for something, didn’t it?

  “Chess,” he made himself say, back in the here and now, “it’s . . . okay. I’ll be fine.”

  “No you won’t.” Chess gave an angry sigh. “Tooth-rot’ll kill you, fool. Gets in your blood. Saw plenty die that way, back in the Lieut’s Company.”

  Morrow set his lip, mutinous—tried to, anyhow. “Look, Chess—I’ll be fine. Don’t need no damn tooth-puller. I’ll just—”

  Ride it off? Was that what he was going to say? Sounded ridiculous, even to him. And it didn’t matter, anyhow. Having made up his own mind, Chess just rolled right over Morrow’s protestations.

  “Big man like you, ’fraid of a pair of grabbers—that’s pure foolishness, son. We’ll get it looked to, maybe put some gold in your smile . . . now, how’d that be?”

  “Aw, stop tryin’ to bribe me, you damn fancy-dancer! Call me ‘son,’ when you’re half my age.”

  “Yeah, there we go. Get mad, Goddamnit! Act a man.” With a grin: “’Sides which, I really wanted to bribe you into anything, I could do it a sight more cheaply—and amuse myself while doin’ so, too.”

  Morrow couldn’t keep himself from flushing at the implication. “Rate your services pretty damn high, don’t you?”

  “Sure. But then again—I’m worth it. Ain’t I?”

  Morrow couldn’t argue with that, literally.

  “Saddle up,” Chess told him. “Next shit-hole’s . . . Mouth-of-Praise, or some such, I seem to recall, from the last time the Rev and I rode through here. Should get there roundabout suppertime—and if the sawbones does his duty, you should be fixed enough to eat it, too.”

  “Chawin’ down with a raw socket ain’t my idea of fun,” Morrow muttered, heaving himself haphazardly into the saddle. “Man, I wish old Kees Hosteen was here.”

  Chess, already seated, tossed his head just the once at their dead friend’s name, like he was flicking flies. “Well, he ain’t,” he replied, shortly.

  Morrow sighed. “I know. It’s just . . . he had a way of makin’ things go smooth, is all.”

  Not the world’s best epitaph—but one he thought Kees might have appreciated, was he still in any way able to.

  Chess shot him another look, this one almost completely unreadable.

  “Talked a sight less than some people, that’s for sure,” he said, at last. And kicked his horse forward, hard as it would go.

  As only seemed fitting, Mouth-of-Praise was mainly false fronts, with every house and shop jacked up twice its actual size with an overhanging façade meant to mask the disrepair within. They rode in slower than Chess usually liked, with what seemed like an inordinate number of eyes on them right from the get-go. Probably didn’t help that Morrow was drooping like he’d been shot, or that Chess’s coat was brighter than most of the ladies’ dresses.

  “Might be they recognize us,” he said.

  Chess didn’t even bother to look ’round. “Oh, ya think?”

  Most places, the local barber did what extraction or patch jobs were needed—but here, perhaps as another mark of greatness yet to come, they’d somehow managed to attract an honest-to-goodness certificate-holder with university bona fides. His shingle, hung beside the expected red-and-white pole, read: CURRER GLOSSING, D.D.S. Painless Process Practised!

  Morrow, who’d had two teeth yanked already, doubted the claim on sight—but damn, if it wasn’t getting difficult to even keep his left eye open. He slid down heavily while Chess tied up their horses, and immediately felt a wave of vertigo so intense he almost wanted to thank Doc Glossing—a plump little thing, blinking meekly up at him from behind gold-rimmed glasses—just for opening the door.

  “Gentlemen,” Glossing said. “You two appear to be in sore need of denticular assistance.”

  He took one of Morrow’s arms, as Chess shrugged himself under the other. Together, they managed to wrangle him over the threshold, and laid him down onto a red plush couch that wouldn’t’ve looked amiss back in one of the ’Frisco whorehouses Chess had grown up in. In similar style, cash changed hands almost immediately—and where Chess had gotten it from, Morrow wasn’t quite sure, given they hadn’t exactly stopped to rob any banks since leaving Mexico, but he wasn’t about to ask. Could be dead leaves dressed up, like in them fairy tales his Ma used to tell. Or dirt, more likely.

  One way or the other, deal done, Chess took up a stance near the window, watching the street as Glossing went about his business: Moistening two pledgets of cotton with a tincture of aconite, chloroform, alcohol and morphine, then packing them firmly ’round the afflicted section of Morrow’s gum, where he fixed them in place with a spring-wound clamp.

  Morrow groaned at the feel, so pathetically it caused Chess’s head to whip ’round,
hand on one gun-butt. “Can’t you do nothin’ more for him?” he demanded.

  “Well now, that has to set a good five to fifteen minutes, in order for the full effect—”

  “Ain’t too like to set at all, he keeps on squirming like that. So pour a fresh shot of the same down his throat, and let’s get the hell on with it.”

  “Um, uhkay, Cheh,” Morrow broke in. But just at that moment—

  “Chess Paaaaaaargeter!”

  Fuck, Morrow thought. I knew it.

  The voice came from up the street a ways, brazen-clanging, impossibly loud; it fairly seemed to make the storefront’s window jump in its frame. Chess swiped the doc’s curtains aside, trying for a better view, and got a shotgun blast over the shoulder for his pains, punching a shower of glass onto the surgery’s floor.

  “Shit!” Chess cursed. “That son of a mother—”

  “Chessss Paaaaargeter!” the voice repeated, yet louder, and the next bunch of pellets peppered higher, some through Chess’s hat-brim. Chess cross-drew, firing back blind ’til he ran dry. At the same time, Morrow reared up, automatically grabbing for his own gun, only to be astonished—make that horrified—by how easily Glossing managed to press him back down to the couch.

  “Sir—sirs!” the dentist protested. “Pargeter—Reverend Rook’s Chess Pargeter?”

  Not anymore, Morrow felt like telling him. But the tincture was definitely starting to work, in that the general cacophony made his head ring swoonishly. Swallowing, he squared his jaw, and managed—“Who ih thah?”

  Chess was down on the floor now, “reloading” his empty guns—chamber by chamber—with fiery little clots of spell-work that dropped from each fingertip in turn. “Can’t damn well see, Goddamnit.” To Glossing: “And as for you, just keep on goin’. I want my money’s worth.”

  “I believe I asked you a question, Mister—”

  From the street: “—PAAAAARGETER!”

  Chess turned, fixed him with a narrowed green glare and rose to his full height—which, though nothing much comparatively, gave him a good half-inch on Glossing.

  “Yeah, that’s right, Doc: I’m Chess Pargeter, he’s Ed Morrow—this is a gun, and so’s this. Now, I’m just gonna go outside and kill that big bastard, and if I come back in here and find Ed ain’t been fixed in the interim, you best believe I will end you. Got that?”

  The dentist drew himself up in turn, primly. “We take an oath, Mister Pargeter, the same as any other school of medicine. I aim to honour mine.”

  Chess shrugged. “Guess we’ll see,” he replied, and went slamming out the back.

  Morrow tried to angle himself so he could see the street—then let loose with a startled yowl as Glossing grabbed his head by the swollen jaw, moving it firmly back to the vertical.

  “Quite enough of that,” the dentist told him. Adding, kind but strict, like a horse-breaker at work: “I’d rather have had a few more minutes setting time to give you, but this will have to do. Hold as still as you can, Mister Morrow.”

  More cold metal wedged his mouth open. Morrow braced himself for agony as the pliers made contact with the bad tooth—but the only thing he felt was the featherlight stroke of soft fingertips on his forehead. A split second later, a warm, fuzzy, gluey feeling took hold, like thick treacle coating every nerve; the faintest pressure, for all that Morrow knew the grabbers and brace dug equal-deep. Glossing’s face, above him, was a blurred black featureless mask against the light.

  This ain’t natural, Morrow thought, stupidly. More like . . . supernatural.

  Which meant—hexation. And hexation meant a trap.

  Aw, crap.

  Chess! Morrow yelled, or tried to; least he owed him was a warning. But all that came out was a harsh rasp of breath, a bit too much like a death-rattle for comfort.

  Glossing might have shaken his head—hard to tell, at this angle. “Save your strength, Mister Morrow.” His voice sounded like bubbles bursting in deep water, far away. “I guarantee my clients painlessness, but you’re far from the first to dislike the side effects. Silence really is golden, it seems, especially when fitting a man for gold teeth. Though I admit—” and here he let his own show, in a sly flicker of discoloured porcelain “—they’re seldom quite so lucky for me, either. Now, before I forget . . .”

  He leaned in, twisted and yanked, hard—’til something gave with a wrench, snapping away with a dull, concussive string of throbs Morrow was thankful to barely feel. Glossing dropped the tooth into a nearby ceramic bowl, then turned to peer out the window, pliers still in the hand he used to shade his eyes.

  “Yuh . . . y’r uh hhhex!” Morrow managed to gargle, through a mouthful of blood.

  Glossing looked back at him with a raised eyebrow, nodded. “Yes. I do apologize for the impacted molar curse, Mister Morrow, but I couldn’t think of a better way to guarantee you’d pay a visit to my poor establishment.” Gazing out the window once more: “No point in sending anything similar Mister Pargeter’s way, of course; it’d’ve simply bounced off and come back in my own direction, no doubt rendered considerably . . . harder, for the journey. Now, let’s us just wait and see how my friend is doing. . . .”

  He appeared not to notice as Morrow, summoning every ounce of effort, pushed himself up on his elbows in order to finally get his head above the windowsill. He spat all down his shirt-front, bright red, and squinted.

  The streets had emptied with the first gunshot, though Morrow thought he could catch the occasional cautious head or pulled-low hat-brim lurking here and there. In the centre of the street, a pale, heavyset, rag-bearded man in filthy tattered buckskins snapped the fresh-loaded shotgun in his hands shut and turned slowly in place, his own gaze casting about fruitlessly.

  “CHESS PARGETER!” the man bellowed once more, abruptly, and Morrow felt a cold trickle in his belly. There was something innately . . . wrong . . . with the man’s voice, an odd disjunction which added an inhumanly thick echo to his monotonous, repetitive cry. As though he was literally unable to say anything other than Chess’s name—to form any other thought, let alone express it aloud.

  But now the silence broke open again, a barrage of thunderous cracks, rapid as hammer blows. The yelling man staggered, buckskins bursting open in a blood-dust spray, as Chess strode up the street, emptying his revolvers into his back.

  They ran dry once more; Chess holstered and struck a pose, looking smug. “That’s just what happens when you make free with a man’s name, and you ain’t even been introduced,” he hollered—then folded his arms, and waited to watch the man fall.

  Which . . . he didn’t.

  The realization came attached to a sound, strange yet familiar, spurring Morrow to turn his head. It was Glossing, chuckling in his throat; greedy, playful, instantly reminiscent of Rook—and Songbird. Songbird with Rook, pulling him down to her level and kissing him hard, sucking magic from him like a damn mosquito. Like it tasted so good she didn’t care whether she killed herself doing it, just so long as she got her fix.

  Chess, back over his shoulder, running headlong to Rook’s rescue: Don’t you know nothin’ ’bout hexes, fool? They can’t take just a little—

  Morrow fair felt his balls clench as he watched Glossing raise his free hand, fingers twitching, a puppeteer pulling strings. Thought, helpless: Shit—move, Chess, move—

  Chess saw that the stuff gurgling from the man’s exit wounds wasn’t blood, but some horrid, blackish goop, a second before the shotgun came up. His eyes widened.

  With a yelp more of surprise than fear he dove to one side, not quite fast enough, and spun as the blast caught the barest edge of his shoulder. He howled in pain and hit the ground hard, scrabbling in the earth for something, anything to throw. The gun centred on Chess, and sickness crawled up Morrow’s throat as the trigger tightened—

  In sheer, futile defiance, Chess snatched up a handful of grit and hurled it, snarling. Only to see the stones multiply and fracture in mid-air, become a howling jet of razor-edged shards flas
hing from Chess’s palm to burst against the gunman-thing’s front, like the deluge from a perforated water tank. Rotten buckskins and pallid flesh peeled back from the thing’s body, sending it staggering backward. The shotgun fell from one disintegrating hand, flipping to discharge again as it hit the ground—right up into its former owner’s groin.

  Stunned, Chess made the mistake of letting his own hand drop. At which point the earth-jet instantly ceased, leaving the truth laid bare most awfully.

  The body beneath those buckskins had never been human; did not even look human, now. By the low-slung hips, black mouldy fur and short thick legs, its bottom half seemed mostly bear. The long wavering spine and deep ribs looked like the remains of a powerful bull’s, while the arms . . . scaly and undersized, their gloved-over paws’ “fingers” actually long nails made for digging, hovering foreshortened up around the creature’s belly. A lizard? Armadillo? Only the head bore any resemblance to a human’s, though slackly mask-like, and that was spoiled by the weird letters incised—black and smoking—on its white brow.

  Glossing pressed his fingers to his mouth, looking absurdly dismayed. Then his rabbit-eyes tightened; with another subtle gesture, he sent the corpse-amalgam lumbering forward, ready and willing to crush by sheer weight what it had failed to shoot dead.

  But Chess had the measure of his foe now, and this was hardly the first dead thing he and Morrow had dealt with. So as it approached he dropped below its clumsy swing and spun, planting a spurred heel square in the thing’s knee. The rotten joint burst, bones snapping; gravity took over and brought the thing down to the ground hard—

  —and Morrow’s head was abruptly crystal clear, while Glossing was doubled over, clutching his own knee, screaming.